Wheatcroft begins with a fairly wide-ranging consideration of the relative importance of journalism to the Waugh family income.
"Waugh’s views of the Irish among the Roman Catholic clergy" are actually kind of interesting:
… one can understand why there is a distinct whiff of anti-clericalism where Irish priests are in power … they have lost their peasant simplicity without acquiring a modest carriage of their modest learning.”
When I was growing up going to Catholic school. I heard many complaints about the Irish nuns. Luckily for me, the grade school I attended from the fourth grade on was staffed by the nuns of the Society of the Sacred Heart. Mother Holmes, my sixth grade teacher, was one of the most important figures in my life. By great good fortune, we connected again via email at the end of her life. I feel sure she's in heaven.
Les Murray's poem "The Family Farmers' Victory", about Italian immigrants to Australia, includes the line
ReplyDelete"Then the wives come out, put up with flies, heat, crocodiles, Irish clergy
A lot of us who grew up in the Midwest sixty years ago reached the edge of our teen years without knowing that was any other kind of clergy than Irish. There was the pope of course, but who saw the pope except on TV once or twice a year?